


Aperture

by evil_whimsey



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-16
Updated: 2010-09-16
Packaged: 2017-10-11 21:35:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_whimsey/pseuds/evil_whimsey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A snapshot of Fuji.  Futurefic.</p>
<p>Update:  Now available as a podfic on Soundcloud.  <a href="http://soundcloud.com/transient-peak/aperture/s-wuStQ">Aperture podfic</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aperture

Apparently there is this quiet dusty street corner outside Mexico City, and Fuji is standing there, squinting against the chilly wind, looking up at a ragged string of blue plastic pennants fluttering overhead. They're the same color blue as the Seigaku banner and they sag, tired and weathered, whenever the wind drops.

He recalls how the banner snapped in the breeze, the afternoon of his last high school match. How it furled across his vision and rippled back, revealing Echizen arching up for a smash, every line of his body straining to fly. And the next time it was Tezuka, the sheer strength of his gravity bending the arc of the ball into his zone.

He recalls the bus ride home, how Echizen tilted unconscious against his shoulder, fingers curled loose in his lap, and how Tezuka's eyes strayed, over and over, across the aisle. As though Echizen, slumbering, had his own gravitational pull.

Fuji is a photographer now. He shoots for fashion, travel, sports; any agency that can afford him. There is also his personal work, often mistakenly referred to as art, though it isn't. Looking past category, composition, context; in short, clearing away any superficial definition of his work, Fuji's photographs only address one of two subjects: microcosms, and desolation.

Beneath the surface of things, somewhere past the subatomic level, Tezuka and Echizen are each bodies of colossal mass. Fuji had always expected they would cancel each other out somehow, or in the worst case scenario, tear each other down, until nothing was left but swirling particles. For years he hovered on their periphery, to see which it would be.

In the end it was neither. Inexplicably, they coexisted, in a kind of hermetic universe of their own making. In the end, it was Fuji who found himself disintegrating, pulled apart in two directions at once, the victim of his own unhealthy fascination.

During tournament season, he travels only to countries where he doesn't know the language. He photographs canyon walls, eroded by thousands of years of raging water. Dry lake beds, where heat waves shimmer and twist across the cracked earth. A coastal village blown to splinters by typhoon winds. A lonely street corner, where the only reminder of the town's last festival hangs in shreds, a flutter of blue against the dusty gray sky.

 

*****


End file.
